DEUTSCHE Bank has
become the latest German company to accept
a measure of guilt for its conduct during
the Second World War by expressing "deep
regret" about its role in taking tainted
Nazi gold. An unusual statement by
Germany's largest commercial bank conceded
"moral and ethical responsibility for the
darkest chapter of its history". The bank
was responding to the report of an
independent historical commission which
said Deutsche Bank might well have known
that gold bought from Hitler's central
bank, the Reichsbank, was taken from death
camp victims.

The historians
calculate that Deutsche bought 4,446kg
(9,780lb) of gold, which may have included
some delivered in sealed sacks by Bruno
Melmer, an SS officer, to the
Reichsbank in Berlin from deposits in
Auschwitz.
This included gold smelted from tooth
fillings of camp inmates, from wedding
rings and other jewellery.

The Deutsche Bank
statement accepted moral responsibility
but did not mention legal or financial
obligations. "The bank regrets most deeply
the injustice that took place ... as has
always been stressed, Deutsche Bank fully
acknowledges its moral and ethical
responsibility for the darkest chapter of
its history."

The omission was
significant because Holocaust survivors
have filed an £11 million lawsuit in
New York against Deutsche and Dresdner
banks. They have both rejected the claim,
saying independent historians were not
able to show that bank directors knew the
origin of the gold. But the five
historians who are investigating
Deutsche's archives - they have been drawn
from Israel, United States, Britain and
Germany - say such prior knowledge cannot
now be ruled out.

It is difficult to
pin down the banks precisely because key
files relating to the so-called Melmer
gold disappeared from Bundesbank archives.
According to an investigation conducted
jointly by the Bundesbank and the
Federal
Archives in Koblenz,
the
26 missing Melmer files seem to have been
available until 1976.

2.

In that year, or
shortly afterwards, they were almost
certainly pulped, along with thousand of
other dossiers of the Nazi era.

The federal
archivists said this week that it was
"intolerable and unforgivable that
documents so closely associated with
National Socialist crimes could have been
split up and then allowed to
disappear".

The investigators
excluded the possibility of a cover-up, as
"the historical significance of the files
could not be properly established at the
time".

However, Hersch
Fischler, a freelance historical
investigator, said yesterday that there
should still be exchanges of
correspondence on the missing gold files
buried in the German Finance
Ministry.

"If the files really
were destroyed it could not have happened
without the knowledge of the United
States," Herr Fischler said.

The US was involved
in the handover of gold files in 1948 from
the Reichsbank to the Bank of German
States - the forerunner of the Bundesbank.
The inventory at the time registered "26
folders re Melmer deposits".

The United States,
in other words, was fully aware that
evidence on concentration camp gold was
sitting in the Bundesbank archives. To
press home a case against German
commercial banks active during the war,
one would have to dig deeper into the
central bank archives and into the company
records of Degussa, which smelted gold
during the Nazi era.

The statement
yesterday by Deutsche was essentially an
attempt to limit damage. The Swiss - under
threat of sanctions unless they offer more
than £364 million to Holocaust
survivors - are keen for Jewish lobbyists
to switch their attention to Germany which
is, after all, at the hub of the Nazi gold
affair.

Sensing both trouble
and lawsuits in the United States, many
German companies have been hiring
independent
historians to
assess their wartime past.

Companies coming
clean include Degussa, the precious metals
trader, various banks including Dresdner,
once dubbed the "SS Bank", as well as
Volkswagen and Daimler, which were among
the many to employ slave
labour.

Our
opinion

WE
WONDER whom they mean by "independent
historians"? We have not been
consulted. The only really independent
minds in Germany, like Günter
Deckert or Udo Walendy, are
currently
in jail
for that very reason -- having really
independent minds.